Top NSA Official Says Russia Election Meddling is Propaganda to Increase War-Spending—Media Silent

Activist Post
Jay Syrmopoulos

William Binney is a 30-year National Security Agency veteran, who served as the global Technical Director for geopolitical analysis at the NSA and was an architect of its surveillance program before becoming a famed whistleblower upon resigning in 2001.

Binney was persecuted for attempting to expose lies and distortions of intelligence by the George W. Bush administration used to justify systematic, massive, and all-encompassing surveillance into all Americans’ private electronic communications.

In regards to Russiagate, Binney has been a strong proponent of the idea that the Democratic National Committee was not hacked by Russians, and in a November 15 interview, published on the Washingtonsblog news-site, titled “How to Instantly Prove (Or Disprove) Russian Hacking of US Election”, he provides a technical analysis that exposes how the Democratic party allegations of “Russian hacking” are a part of an operation of intentional deception backed by the military-intelligence-industrial complex.

The former NSA tech guru says the agency he worked at for decades has evidence of exactly who hacked… or instead, proves that the emails were leaked by a Democratic party insider.

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Trump = Obama = Bush = Clinton On 4 Core Issues

Washington's Blog

On a superficial level, Trump and Bush couldn’t be more different from Clinton and Obama.  Indeed, pollsters say that many people voted for Trump because they wanted change … Just like they voted for Obama because he promised “hope and change” from Bush-era policies.


But beneath the surface, Trump, Obama, Bush and Clinton are all very similar on 4 core issues.

Moar War

Bush intentionally lied us into the Iraq war … a war which had no relation with U.S. security or defense.

Clinton and Obama intentionally lied us into various “humanitarian wars” … which had nothing to do with our security or defense.

And the same idiots who lied us into the Iraq war are now trying to lie us into a cold (or maybe even hot) war with Russia.

And what about Trump?

He campaigned on peace and non-interventionism …

But he’s already ramped up the war in Syria.

And the war in Yemen. … where the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are committing war crimes.
And he’s already increased drone strikes by 432%.

And Trump’s top advisor is predicting war with China and Russia. He said:

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‘Fake News’ Isn’t New: Dissecting Two Decades Of War Propaganda

Mnar Muhawesh
Mint Press News

Author and noted peace activist David Swanson joins host Mnar Muhawesh on ‘Behind the Headline’ about the narrative on Aleppo and Russia’s role in the Syrian conflict, dissecting who benefits and how. 

MINNEAPOLIS — The “fog of war” erupts in the confusion caused by the chaos of war. And in the media, it’s an intentional phenomenon that makes it difficult to separate fact from fiction.

While the battles over war narratives evolve, they all have a common goal: to distort reality on the ground.

Such is the case on the crisis in Syria, the new cold war with Russia, and even the buildup for President Bush’s support for Kuwait’s “humanitarian” war against Iraq.

On Oct. 10, 1990, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl identified only as “Nayirah” told the Congressional Human Rights Caucus that she witnessed Iraqi soldiers removing babies from incubators and leaving them on a cold floor to die.

Her testimony was cited numerous times by senators and even President George H.W. Bush as  justification for backing Kuwait in the Gulf War against Saddam Hussein, which erupted just three months later.

However, it was later revealed that “Nayirah” was the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the United States, and her testimony was arranged by a PR firm representing a Kuwaiti-sponsored group lobbying Congress for military intervention.

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Clinton Plans to Destroy Russia

strategic-culture.org

 

Leaked emails are filling in the picture of a Bill-and-Hillary-Clinton plan to destroy Russia — a plan which had originated with U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush in 1990, and which has been followed through both by his son George W. Bush, and by both of the Clintons, but which has only recently started to become documented by leaked publications of personal communications amongst the key operatives who were the insiders running this operation behind the scenes, and who include Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, Victoria Nuland, Jeffrey Feltman, Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud, Saudi Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman al-Saud, and the Emir of Qatar.

This operation came out into public view only briefly when the news site Zero Hedge headlined on 6 October 2015 “Saudi Clerics Call For Jihad Against Russia, Iran” and linked to a number of sources, including to a Wall Street Journal report the day before, which simply ignored the Saudi involvement and headlined “U.S. Sees Russian Drive Against CIA-Backed Rebels in Syria”, as if this matter were merely a U.S.-v.-Russia issue, not an issue involving the Saud family at all. By contrast, the zerohedge article closed with “‘This is a real war on Sunnis, their countries and their identities,’ said the statement [by the International Union of Muslim Scholars, which is based in Qatar, whose ruling family, the Thanis, work closely with the Saud family]. It urged the rebels to join a ‘jihad against the enemy of God and your enemy, and Muslims will back you every way they can.’” As a British news-site for jihadists put the matter, “According to experts, by issuing this statement they seek to encourage Saudi, Gulf, and Muslim youths to fight against Russian forces, similar to the recruitment of young fighters during the Afghan-Soviet war.” (That joint U.S.-Saudi operation, which was assisted by the Pakistani military and by Pakistan’s heavily-Saudi-influenced Islamic clergy, was the brainchild of Saudi Prince Bandar and of the born Polish aristocrat Zbigniew Brzezinski, and its success at breaking up the Soviet Union is an enduring topic of pride for today’s jihadists.) On 5 October 2015, the British mainstream ‘news’ site Reuters had called these “Saudi opposition clerics”, and alleged that they “are not affiliated with the government,” but Reuters’s statement (especially that these were “Saudi opposition clerics”) was simply false, and even ridiculously false, likely an outright lie, because Saudi laws don’t allow any “opposition clerics,” especially not Islamic ones, since those would be executed for publicly questioning the legitimacy of the country’s rule by the royal Saud family, which is what an “opposition cleric” in Saudi Arabia would, by definition, be doing, if any of them existed there and hadn’t been executed yet. 

The pretense, by Reuters, that Saudi Arabia is a religious-freedom country, is an insult to their readership, but this falsehood helps to keep their readership thinking that somehow the West can be allied with the Sauds and yet still call itself ‘democratic’ and allied only with ‘democratic’ governments, not with some of the world’s worst tyrannies. Realism in foreign affairs (such as to acknowledge that some of the world’s worst regimes are our government’s allies) is fine, but it can’t include lying to one’s own public, because that necessarily entails misinforming the voters on the basis of which any actual democracy receives its very legitimacy as being a democracy, which seems less and less what countries such as the U.S. and UK are, at least after 9/11. A “democracy” and a “deceived public” cannot coexist in the same country — and, at least in the United States, a deceived public is what predominantly exists (as a consequence of the many deceiving ‘news’ media).

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Ex-CIA Chief: Bush and Cheney Knew 9/11 Was Imminent, Concealed Intelligence

theantimedia.org

 

A new report from POLITICO corroborates a suspicion long held by critics of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. It affirms the former president and vice president not only had intelligence warning the terror attacks of 9/11 were imminent, but that they repeatedly ignored the CIA’s warnings. The most shocking assertion is that Bush and Cheney actively attempted to hide the paper trail documenting the fact that the evidence was presented to them.

The claim comes from none other than ex-CIA Chief George Tenet, who recounted with palpable frustration how Bush, Cheney, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice ignored multiple warnings from both him and then-counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black, during the late spring and summer of 2001.

Previously, the most salient proof the Bush administration had advanced warning of 9/11 was the infamous August 6th edition of the CIA Presidential Daily Brief given to George W. Bush. Titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” the document has often been cited by journalists and whistleblowers making a case of willful negligence against Bush and Cheney. The new information from Tenet and Black presents a considerably deeper timeline, showing there was a consistent stream of intelligence warnings starting at least four months prior to September 11th.

According to Black, by May of 2001 “it was very evident that we were going to be struck, we were gonna be struck hard and lots of Americans were going to die.”

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Jeb Bush Linked to Cartel Money Laundering While Serving CIA

Wayne Madsen
Black Listed News

While Jeb’s brother, George W. Bush, glossed over his AWOL status with the Texas Air National Guard, Jeb does not have a military record to defend but he does have a CIA employment record to fess up to.

Jeb’s early work in Venezuela and south Florida is much more troubling than Dubya pretending to be on active duty in Texas while he was actually off in Alabama helping a GOP U.S. Senate campaign and getting sloppy drunk in redneck bars. Jeb should fully explain his relationship with Alberto Duque, a Colombian national who laundered drug money for the Medellin and Cali narco-cartels and Nicaraguan contras while serving as owner of City National Bank of Miami and president of the General Coffee Company of Colombia.

Apparently, there was more than coffee arriving in sacks of coffee coming into Miami from Colombia. Duque financed a $30 million real estate development project run by Jeb Bush.
In 1983, Duque was convicted for fraud and sent to federal prison. Duque hired a Bush family CIA crony to serve as City National Bank’s president.

He was Don Beazley, who previously worked for the CIA’s Nugan Hand Bank in Australia. Before it collapsed, Nugan Hand was responsible for laundering money from the CIA’s Golden Triangle opium and heroin smuggling operations from Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle and paying off U.S. surrogates in Asia, including Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Suharto in Indonesia, Park Chung Hee in South Korea, and various Thai generals.

In return for CIA money gifts, Marcos ordered his Energy Minister, Geronimo Velasco, to have the Philippines National Oil Corporation enter into business relationships with three Bush family-owned businesses: Zapata Petroleum Corporation, Zapata Offshore Company, and Overbey Oil Development Corporation. The three Bush firms were also linked to various CIA activities, including the abortive 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

Jeb Bush’s Texas Commerce Bank was also the bank used by the Zapata companies. Velasco died of a sudden heart attack in San Francisco in 2007. Velasco’s Republic Glass Corporation became a holding company that owned a number of British Virgin Islands-based subsidiaries.

Beazley had also been president of Great American Bank of Miami. The bank was indicted for drug money laundering in 1982. Beazley also negotiated the sale of Second National Bank of Homestead, a subsidiary of Great American, to Nugan Hand. It was in this environment of interconnected CIA money laundering banks that Jeb Bush found himself and his real estate business immersed in the 1980s.

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WH Chef: Another Bush-Clinton Crime Family Murder?

Wayne Madsen
Wayne Madsen Report

SPECIAL REPORT. Not so fast on ex-White House chef's "accidental" death while hiking

If any responsible law enforcement officer or journalist had made the effort to read the 2007 memoir of ex-White House chef Walter Scheib, “White House Chef: Eleven Years, Two Presidents, One Kitchen,” which was written with Andrew Friedman, they might not have been so quick to accept the ruling that his death while hiking in the mountains near Taos, New Mexico was merely "accidental." Scheib, who was hired as White House executive chef and was well-liked by one 2016 presidential candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, was adamantly disliked by George W. Bush, the brother of Jeb Bush, another 2016 presidential candidate.

On June 13, Scheib started hiking the Yerba Linda trail in the Sangre de Cristo (literally, "blood of Christ") Mountains after parking his car at a lot at the trailhead.

His body was found in a river within the wilderness area on June 21. Scheib, who was previously twice married, was reported missing by his girlfriend. An autopsy revealed that Scheib drowned in a rain-swollen river. As with the suspicious deaths of other politically-connected individuals, including former CIA director William Colby, CIA agent John Paisley, and former Export-Import Bank chairman Phil Merrill, bodies found in the water normally result in inconclusive toxicology examinations conducted as part of the autopsy.

While Scheib wrote in his introductory Author's Note that he had no intention of dishing dirt on anyone he worked with during his eleven years as the "First Chef," it is clear that his time as a White House employee markedly changed when the Clintons left the White House in 2001 and the Bushes arrived.

Scheib wrote, "there's no so-called 'dirt' to be found about the First Families here, and no commenting on the personal or political challenges faced by either of the administrations I served."

While there was no "dirt" offered up in the Clintons -- the name Monica Lewinsky does not appear once -- there is enough on the high-browed haughtiness of Laura Bush, who practically personally approved every menu, always insisting on "country club food," and the simple-mindedness of Dubya to indicate that Scheib might have proven to be an embarrassment to the Bush family as Jeb Bush prepared to announce his White House bid.

Ex-White House chef Walter Scheib knew a lot about 9/11. And he suddenly died just as Jeb Bush was announcing he was running for president.

It is Scheib's personal recollections about what happened at the White House on the morning of September 11, 2001, that may have made him a target for Bush-style "silencing" in the weeks before Jeb Bush's announcement that he was running for the presidency. The Bush family, known as the "family that preys together," may have found Scheib's recollections of the Bush years from 2001 to February 2005, when, after Bush's re-election, he was unceremoniously fired by the trio of Laura Bush, White House social secretary and DC socialite Lea Berman -- the wife of GOP lobbyist Wayne Berman -- and a pretentious dandy named Kenneth Blasingame, Laura's good friend and her interior decorator from Texas, to be too much "insider information" that might prejudice the voting public's desire to have yet a third Bush occupy the White House.

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Bush family ties to terror suspects re-opened by 9/11 '28 pages'

Digital Journal

As pressure builds to make public 28 pages of a joint congressional inquiry on 9/11 which was classified by President George W. Bush, the Bush family's well-documented relationships to Saudi and other foreign terror suspects are again coming to the fore.

North Carolina Republican Congressman Walter Jones told the New Yorker last September, of the what is now commonly known as the “28 Pages”: 

“There’s nothing in it about national security...It’s about the Bush Administration and its relationship with the Saudis.”

Prominent in the rise of the political fortunes of both the 41st and 43rd presidents is the support of figures listed by the US government as terrorist financiers, as well as some connected to the now closed, Saudi-controlled criminal enterprise known as BCCI. Of special interest to independent researchers is the failure of the nation's air defenses on 9/11, and the reliance of these defenses on the company formerly known as Ptech, which was founded with funding partly from Saudi financiers with ties to designated terrorist organizations, which employed a mix of foreign nationals and Americans with ties to Israeli software companies with possible links to Israeli Mossad. Now renamed Go Agile, Ptech is a purveyor of software which is critical to the security of major software systems embedded throughout the FAA and the US Department of Defense. A small number of congressmen have been allowed to read the classified pages, and are pushing to have them declassified. During a press conference in March of 2014, Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie, Republican, said: 

“As I read it, and we all had our own experience, I had to stop every couple of pages and just sort of try to absorb and try to rearrange my understanding of history. “It challenges you to re-think everything. I think the whole country needs to go through that.”

The effort to declassify the pages is being spearheaded by 9/11 families. A website has been started named 28pages.org. Two major investors in the 43rd president's early business ventures, Arbusto Energy and Harken Energy, were Salem bin Laden, Osama's older brother, and Khalid bin Mahfouz, a 20% stakeholder in BCCI, who was himself accused and investigated for financing terrorism. Mahfouz, who died in 2009, was known as the personal banker of the Saudi royal family. In 1992 then-Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts and Senator Hank Brown, Republican of Colorado, in a widely-lauded Senate Foreign Policy Committee investigation of BCCI, found that BCCI's “criminality” included: 

“support of terrorism, arms trafficking, and the sale of nuclear technologies; its management of prostitution; its commission and facilitation of income tax evasion, smuggling, and illegal immigration; its illicit purchases of banks and real estate; and a panoply of financial crimes limited only by the imagination of its officers and customers.”

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Jeb Bush claims 'I'm my own man', but he has a very familiar foreign policy team

Comment: The Bush dynasty is back (though in truth they never left) and it's Jeb's turn to enter the revolving door of  that quaint idea we wistfully call "elections." 

------------------- 

" Perhaps the most controversial name on Mr Bush’s team sheet is Paul Wolfowitz, who worked for Reagan and for both Bush administrations, and who, as George W Bush’s deputy defence secretary, was a leading advocate for the invasion of Iraq."

The Independent 

In his first major foreign policy speech since mooting a 2016 presidential run, Jeb Bush sought to distance himself from the legacy of his brother, admitting mistakes were made in Iraq, and called for the world to “take out” Isis.

Noting the inevitable comparisons between himself and presidents George HW and George W Bush, the former governor of Florida said: “I love my father and my brother. I admire their service to the nation and the difficult decisions they had to make. But I am my own man – and my views are shaped by my own thinking.”

He has previously backed the Iraq War but today he admitted that “there were mistakes made in Iraq for sure”. However, he credited his brother with sending a surge of troops that helped quell the insurgency at the time.

Mr Bush made the remarks at an event hosted by non-partisan think-tank the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He was “lucky”, he said, to have a father and brother who both “shaped America’s foreign policy”. But, he went on, “every president inherits a changing world… and changing circumstances”.

Read more (if you can stomach it). 

U.S. Celebrates 500th “Targeted Killing” Since 2002: 3,674 Dead including 473 Civilians

All Gov.

Another milestone has been reached in the ongoing war against suspected terrorists in the Middle East and elsewhere—the United States has launched 500 attacks, or “targeted killings” in governmentspeak. 

Micah Zenko at the Council on Foreign Relations published an accounting of attacks, overwhelmingly by drones, against people in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Although sources don’t always agree on the number of attacks, the realistic number reached through averaging is 500. The “targeted killings” aren’t as well targeted as they might be; 473 civilians are among the 3,674 who have died in the attacks.

Four hundred fifty of the attacks have come during the administration of President Barack Obama with George W. Bush ordering the first 50.

Despite all those attacks, the number of al-Qaeda affiliates remains about the same, according to the State Department. The only category where the numbers appear to have fallen is among Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, where the population has fallen from “several thousand” to 1,000.   

Last month, according to The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, there were nine U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan and at least one and as many as three in Yemen. Between 33 and 83 people were reported to have been killed in the October strikes. Previous counts of those killed by drone strikes in Pakistan reveal that as few as 12% of the dead were identified as militants, according to the Bureau.

-Steve Straehley

To Learn More:

America’s 500th Drone Strike (by Micah Zenko, Council on Foreign Relations)

October 2014 Update: U.S. Covert Actions in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia (by Jack Serle and Abigail Fielding-Smith, Bureau of Investigative Journalism)

Only 12% of Pakistanis Killed by Drones Identified as Militants (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)

Majority of CIA Drone Attacks in Pakistan Hit Homes (by Steve Straehley, AllGov)

Total Drone Deaths in Pakistan Top 2,000 (by Steve Straehley, AllGov)

The Covert Origins of ISIS

Evidence exposing who put ISIS in power, and how it was done. Sources and full transcript: http://scgnews.com/the-covert-origins...

Barack Hussein Obama: Manchurian Candidate And Trojan Horse, Warmonger And Deceiver

Michael Thomas
State of the Nation

Let’s get something out of the way for all the partisan readers and Obamabots who will NOT like this graphic portrayal of the current US President.

George W. Bush was perhaps the worst president in US History.  His eight year term in office clearly marked a new low point in American history.  By unlawfully and deceitfully invading both Iraq and Afghanistan, he set the entire world on a course toward World War III.  His entirely bogus War On Terror was as contrived as it was an ongoing policy of state-sponsored terrorism against the non-white, non-Christian world.

In the end, W. Bush will be known as the occupant of the White House who triggered the real Clash of Civilizations after outright stealing two national elections.  So determined were the Neo-Cons to push the world into a WWIII scenario that they found in George W.Bush a mean-spirited, narrow-minded and self-absorbed individual who could be easily manipulated into doing just about anything Dick Cheney et al. told him to do.

Oh, yes, one last thing — and it represents a HUGE difference between George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama.  Please forgive our candor but the following short exposition is quite purposeful in making an extremely important point.

As follows:

Everyone knew deep down inside that W. Bush was unfit for presidential duty and quite a dangerous dolt.

He, himself, knew he was a dunderhead.

We all knew he was a dunderhead.

The entire world knew he was a dunderhead.

He knew that we knew, that he was a dunderhead.

We knew that he knew, that he was a dunderhead.

And so on and so on … … …

What’s the point?

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The Neocons “Grand Plan” and Obama’s Blundering Foreign Policy: “An Actor Playing the Role of a President”?

Prof. Rodrigue Tremblay
Global Research 

“I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being. But what makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it is our willingness to affirm them through our actions.” President Barack Obama, May 29, 2014 commencement speech at West Point.

“War is mankind’s most tragic and stupid folly; to seek or advise its deliberate provocation is a black crime against all men.”,  President Dwight Eisenhower, 1947 commencement speech at West Point.

“Politically speaking, tribal nationalism always insists that its own people is surrounded by “a world of enemies”, “one against all”, that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man.” Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951

“…An empire is a despotism, and an emperor is a despot, bound by no law or limitation but his own will; it is a stretch of tyranny beyond absolute monarchy. For, although the will of an absolute monarch is law, yet his edicts must be registered by parliaments. Even this formality is not necessary in an empire.” John Adams (1735-1826), 2nd American President

Am I alone in having the uneasy feeling, while listening to Barack Obama’s speeches, that we are witnessing an actor playing the role of an American president and carefully reading the script he has been given? As time goes by, indeed, Barack Obama seems to be morphing more and more into a Democratic George W. Bush. Those who write his speeches seem to have the same warmongering mentality as those who wrote George W. Bush’s or Dick Cheney’s speeches, ten years ago.

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The Fall of Iraq - What You Aren't Being Told

Storm Clouds Gathering

The Obama administration is making it clear that airstrikes targeting ISIS would extend into Syria.  One year ago the Obama administration was doing their very best to build up public support for U.S. military intervention in Syria. Even though that attempt failed, no one who has been following this crisis closely believed for a moment that this was the end. They would regroup and try again from another angle.

The angle they chose was surprising. Iraq has been off the media radar for so long that almost no one was factoring it in as an important geopolitical variable. ISIS (or ISIL) changed that.

In our video "The Fall of Iraq What You're Not Being Told" we covered the history of U.S. tinkering in Iraq dating back to 1963, and showed how the U.S. government's push to topple Assad by funding and arming extremists in Syria enabled ISIS to gain a foothold in the region. At the end of that video we pointed to how this latest crisis in Iraq was likely to be used as a pretext for U.S. strikes in Syria.

The Obama administration confirmed this when questioned yesterday on whether the U.S. military intervention in Iraq would be extended to Syria. Their response: “We don't restrict potential U.S. action to a specific geographic space,” 

"The president's made clear time and again that we will take action as necessary, including direct U.S. military action, if it's necessary to defend the United States against an imminent threat," the official said.

"Clearly we're focused on Iraq. That's where our ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] resources have surged. That's where we're working to develop additional intelligence," the official added.

"But the group [ISIS], again, operates broadly and we would not restrict our ability to take action that is necessary to protect the United States."

Oh, and this time Obama is not going to ask for permission from Congress. 

No one is talking about how the Syrian government (and the Washington's desire to topple it) fits into this, but once the U.S. is carrying out airstrikes in Syrian territory, it would be trivial to expand the scope of the mission to include Syrian military targets. That way there would be no need for debate on the topic. The public would just find out we were at war after the fact (and probably via youtube). It's a backdoor approach.

Another variable that has changed in the equation since last year is Russia's involvement. Due to the crisis in Ukraine, Russia has been placed on the defensive diplomatically, and as of yet it seems to be too tied up with disputes with Kiev to take an active role in the deliberations over ISIS. In the first round of the Syrian crisis both China and Russia warned the U.S. several times against military intervention, and Russia threatened that it could lead to a nuclear conflict. 

At this point, it's not clear whether Russia and China see where Washington is planning to take this, or if they will back up their previous threats when the time comes. It is also yet to be seen whether the relentless anti-Russia propaganda campaign that western media outlets have been pushing since the Ukraine crisis will affect Putin's ability to influence the outcome diplomatically. The annexation of Crimea will definitely be used to discredit Putin if he attempts to block airstrikes in Syria.

However, perhaps the most important variable here is whether the public will react in a timely manner.

Psycho 'Reality Creators' open 'gates of hell' in Iraq with proxy Jihadis

Joe Quinn
Sott.net 
June 17, 2014

In case you were wondering why, despite the sterling efforts of the Bush and Obama governments to bring 'freedom and democracy' to Iraq, life there appears to be worse than ever, a brief review of the nature of American and European largesse that has been bestowed on the Iraqi people over the past twenty-odd years may be instructive.

First there was the 1991 Iraq War turkey shoot that killed thousands of Iraqi civilians and killed or wounded over 100,000 Iraqi soldiers; then followed the 10 years of regular US bombing runs and the willful genocide of Iraqis, especially children, via the 'food for oil' sanctions. Then came the second Gulf War turkey shoot, justified (not 'officially', but it wouldn't have happened otherwise) by the self-inflicted wound that was the 9/11 attacks, that involved a 10-year occupation by the US military and the further direct slaughter of at least 1.5 million Iraqis by the US military and the displacement of 4 million more.

By 2011, with the country in ruins and the the bulk of US troops preparing to leave, US military 'advisers' hastily cobbled together an 'Iraqi army'. Unfortunately, the tribal nature of Iraqi society, the serious divisions between Sunni and Shia that had been provoked by 10 years of bloody foreign occupation, including the use of US-sponsored death squads (aka 'al-qaeda'), and the installation of a Shia-led government in a country previously dominated by the minority Sunnis under Saddam, made the very idea of a united Iraqi army a fantasy. But those details were of little concern to the occupiers. A few major weapons and oil deals and the US was outta there. Thanks for the memories... for a while. 

Next Stop - Syria

 Then came the (Israeli-sponsored) plan to 'remake' Syria. But when it was decided that a US invasion and occupation of that country was too problematic in the sense that it might set the entire Middle East alight and threaten Israeli sensitivities, plan B was to use the same fundamentalist jihadi nut-jobs from Iraq to start a 'revolution' that the majority of the Syrian people wanted nothing to do with. But after three years of direct and indirect funding and arming of the jihadis by the USA, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and massive bloodshed, with several Syrian cities reduced almost to rubble, Assad was still there, the Syrian army were prevailing against the nut-jobs, and the psychopaths at the US state department, the CIA and in Tel Aviv, were getting antsy. 'Can't we just have NATO bomb the crap out of the place?' A pretext was needed, and last year the Saudis were used to supply sarin gas to the jihadis (or a Saudi black op team did it themselves), who happily sacrificed the lives of 1,000 Syrian civilians in Ghouta in an effort to blame the Assad government for 'war crimes' and justify NATO (i.e. USA) bombing.

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The Most Destructive Presidencies in U.S. History: George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama

Charles Hugh-Smith 
Of Two Minds
June 16, 2014 


Powers once granted are almost impossible to take back.

After 13.5 years, there is more than enough evidence for reasonable people to conclude that the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama are easily the most destructive in U.S. history.

When historians speak of failed presidencies or weak presidencies, they are typically referring to presidencies characterized by uneven leadership, petty corruption by self-serving cronies or in extreme cases such as the Nixon presidency, abuses of executive power.

But weak or failed presidencies are not destructive to the rule of law and the foundations of the nation. The failed president leaves office and the basic structure of the nation continues: the rule of law, the balance of powers and a free-market economy.

A destructive president weakens or corrupts these core structures in favor of executive-branch powers, and passes these unconstitutional powers to the next executive for further expansion.

The Bush and Obama presidencies have effectively dismantled the rule of law and the Constitution by invoking essentially unlimited executive powers in the name of "national security:" we the citizens of the U.S. can now be accused of violating secret laws, be indicted in secret, tried in secret and sentenced to life in prison based on evidence fabricated in secret, i.e. declaring unclassified documents classified after the fact to incriminate and imprison whistleblowers.

How is this any different from totalitarian fascist regimes?

This is absolutely contrary to basic civil liberties defined by the Constitution. Who benefits from this destruction of fundamental civil liberties? (Always start by asking cui bono--to whose benefit?)

The Big Lie is that this destruction of the foundations of the rule of law and civil liberties is for our own good: if the President and the National Security State don't grab all these powers and deprive you of your constitutional rights, bad guys will destroy the nation.

This is of course the same old tired justification used by dictators and despots everywhere, and it is always a lie. The truth that must be hidden is that this wholesale expansion of executive powers at the expense of civil liberties, democracy, the rule of law and the balance of powers benefits the executive branch.

Every abuse of the law is now declared legal by executive order. Anyone questioning the legality of extra-legal abuses of power is told "this is legal because it was authorized by the President." In other words, executive power is now unquestioned and cannot be challenged.

For a variety of unsavory reasons, the Supreme Court has enabled this expansion of essentially unlimited executive power. Congress has also rubber-stamped it as part of The Global War on Terror (GWOT), the unlimited war that justifies unlimited executive powers, unlimited secrecy and unlimited expansion of the National Security State, the Deep State that is impervious to changes in electoral government.

Presidents Bush and Obama have directed this expansion of the National Security State because it greatly enhances the power of the Presidency. This is how we get a president who is delighted to discover that he's good at killing people remotely with drone strikes.

The expansion of secret programs and secret wars has engorged the Pentagon, the C.I.A. and the N.S.A., not just with funding but more importantly, with new powers granted by the executive branch and rubber-stamped by an impotent Congress and supine Supreme Court.

The president's power is greatly enhanced by this expansion of the National Security State, and the self-serving "patriots" empowered by the essentially unlimited secrecy are free to do whatever they please under the umbrella of executive privilege.

True patriots attempting to defend basic constitutional rights are labeled terrorists by the phony patriots busy destroying the foundations of the nation. The Orwellian doublespeak is as unlimited as executive power: a citizen who releases unclassified material about the secret abuse of power can be accused of treason on the Kafkaesque basis that unclassified material can be considered classified if it exposes the abuse of executive power.

All of this is well-documented and has been in the public realm for years. There is nothing mysterious about the destruction of basic rights or the abrogation of the balance or power or the rule of law. It's visible and painfully obvious to anyone who cares to read or watch a few interviews of whistleblowers who have been hounded and harassed by the Obama Administration.

For two examples of hundreds of articles and interviews, please read:

Senior NSA Executive: NSA Started Spying On Journalists in 2002... In Order to Make Sure They Didn’t Report On Mass Surveillance (washingtonsblog.com; I recommend the entire series of interviews) "To me, there’s a psychology that’s not often written about: What happens when you have this much reach and power, and constraints of law and even policy simply fade into the woodwork."

PBS Frontline Interview - Thomas Drake.

This destruction of the fundamental building blocks of the nation has been rubber-stamped by gutless Republicans and Democrats alike. Cowed by the threat of appearing "soft on terrorism," left and right alike have scrambled to appear "tough on terrorism" by approving the wholesale transfer of power to the National Security State and the executive branch.

Of the dozens of books published on the abuses of executive power and the uncontrolled expansion of the National Security State, here are two worthy starting points:

The Family Jewels: The CIA, Secrecy, and Presidential Power
The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth

This destruction of the fundamental building blocks of the nation has been rubber-stamped by gutless Republicans and Democrats alike. Cowed by the threat of appearing "soft on terrorism," left and right alike have scrambled to appear "tough on terrorism" by approving the wholesale transfer of power to the National Security State and the executive branch.

It is laughable to see so-called liberals and conservatives alike in Congress kow-tow to the National Security State while claiming they have effective oversight, even as the revelations of whistleblowers reveals them as clueless toadies with no real grasp of what is being done in the name of the American people they claim to represent.

Those abusing executive power in the Nixon administration knew they were breaking the law. Those abusing power in the Bush and Obama administrations simply declare their actions legal. In effect, any action taken by the president or the National Security State is legal in name if not in principle.

Powers once granted are almost impossible to take back. What president will give away essentially unlimited executive powers established as "law" by previous presidents? We don't elect saints as presidents, we elect infinitely ambitious people desiring power. We should not be surprised that such people not only consolidate the power they inherit but actively seek more.

We should also not be surprised that all these power grabs by the executive branch and the National Security State are cloaked in secrecy, and that anyone who dares to reveal the power grabs and abuses of power to the public is declared a traitor and crucified.

A traitor to what? It's a question every citizen should ask and answer for themselves.

War Criminal Tony Blair Sidesteps Call For Iraq Note Release

RINF via Morning Star

TONY BLAIR ducked calls yesterday for him to sanction the release of his exchanges with former US president George Bush in the run-up to the Iraq war.

The tight-lipped former prime minister said questions about the Chilcot inquiry were “for another day” as he was grilled by reporters after a speech on Europe.

Campaigners have criticised as a whitewash the decision to limit publication to “quotes or gists.” The mother of one soldier killed in the conflict has also lambasted Mr Blair.

Rose Gentle, whose 19-year-old son Gordon was killed in Iraq in June 2004, said she was “sickened” by the decision to only publish selected sections and believed Mr Blair would “walk away from it with a smile on his face.”

Negotiations over the publication of the “vital” material, which includes 25 notes from Mr Blair to the then US president and more than 130 records of conversations between them, is understood to have been behind long delays in publication of the report into the invasion.

Charges of Lies Swirl Around Tim Geithner’s New Book, “Stress Test”

Comment: The arrogance of these shysters knows no bounds. And now they're starting to scrap with each other publicly.  This is going to happen more and more...

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Wall St. On Parade

Tim Geithner, former head of the New York Fed during the lead up to the Wall Street melt down, then Secretary of the Treasury in President Obama’s first term, is undergoing his own version of a big bank stress test: does he have the capital to survive the storm he has stirred up with his new, revisionist history book, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises.

Geithner’s book has barely made it to the bookstore shelves (it’s slated for official release today) and already he’s been called a liar by R. Glenn Hubbard, Dean of the Columbia Business School; Geithner is effectively calling author Ron Suskind a liar in the book; and the book’s attack on Neil Barofsky, former Special Inspector General of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) has warranted a strong response from Barofsky where he says he doesn’t believe former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson made the remarks that Geithner has attributed to him against Barofsky.

Politico’s MJ Lee explains the ruckus between Hubbard and Geithner. Hubbard was the head of the Council of Economic Advisers during the presidency of George W. Bush and advisor to Mitt Romney during his 2012 campaign. Geithner says in the book that Hubbard told him “Well, of course we have to raise taxes — we just can’t say that now.” Hubbard told Politico this statement “just happens to be a lie.”

Read more

 

Bush and Obama Are Both Evil Men

 

Source:  www.mistahboombastic.blogspot.co.uk/

RINF

Michael S. Rozeff

Singling out the last two presidents as evil is not to let other U.S. government officials, past and present, off the hook. It is only to focus on recent, visible and incontrovertible instances of evil deeds done by evil men.

Bush lied the U.S. into a vicious and aggressive war against Iraq. He’s responsible for a huge number of deaths and injuries.

Obama attacked Libya based on lies. Hoping to destroy the Syrian military by a bombing campaign, he lied about the gas attack in August 2013. Obama constantly lies.

Bush and Obama are wicked men, corrupt men, vicious men who have done profoundly malevolent deeds.

The U.S. government and its presstitute media have become so pervasively corrupt that the wickedness of one branch goes unnoticed by the others, or if noticed then unmentioned, and if mentioned then uncorrected by the other branches. The wickedness of one branch is far more likely to be joined in and approved of by the other branches than it is to be criticized, investigated and stopped.

Every day some U.S. government official, and usually many of them, propose, endorse or instigate some malicious act or law. Only a few days ago, the Congress unanimously passed a measure forbidding a visa to an Iranian diplomat who had been appointed as its U.N. representative. What term other than malevolent better describes such a despicable, vindictive, vengeful and vile act?

Via LewRockwell

Eleven Years After US Invaded Iraq Bloodshed, Rape, Torture & Executions in the Country Are Ignored

 

Kevin Gosztola
The Dissenter

Kenneth Pollack, who has worked for the CIA and the National Security Council, was a prime advocate for the United States invasion and occupation of Iraq. He published a book called “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq” that was considered widely to be a very convincing case that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or was close to obtaining them. But Pollack, like many other war advocates who populated the airwaves of US media in the months prior to invasion, was wrong.

As bloody violence continues to erupt in Iraq, Pollack has not stopped being an advocate of greater US involvement or aid in Iraq, even though it has only helped to enable Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to further develop his brutal security forces.

A senior fellow for the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, he spoke before a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee in December 2013 and declared, “It is a great credit to this committee that at a time when the nation appears determined to forget our interests in Iraq, you refuse to do so. It is absolutely vital.”

“Since 2003, the United States has invested an enormous amount in Iraq, and the future of Iraq remains of great importance to the interests of the United States and our allies. Iraq has replaced Iran as the second leading oil exporter in OPEC, and projections of future low oil prices are highly contingent upon the continued growth of Iraqi oil exports. Remembering that virtually every postwar American recession was preceded by an increase in oil prices, Iraq and its oil production remain critical to the prosperity of the United States,” he added.

This was his first expressed concern: the future of oil production. He then proceeded to address the resurgence of al Qaeda and other issues in Iraq.

Pollack is emblematic of those who the world can quite clearly see were wrong. On the ten-year anniversary of the Iraq invasion, he still maintained, “Saddam didn’t have the capability we were ascribing to him — we were absolutely wrong about that — but he did have the motivation. He thought about nuclear weapons in a way most of the world does not. What we’re getting from the tapes of conversations among his inner circle is that he says they need to acquire nuclear weapons to wage war against Israel. There’s no sign this is bluster at all.”

Essentially, it may not have worked out as well as it could have, but, in the end, something had to be done.

Pollack is one of the few voices that can be found still writing about what they think the United States should be doing in Iraq. Like former Vice President Dick Cheney and others who served in President George W. Bush’s administration, he remains interested in the prize of oil in Iraq and how more of the country’s oil reserves could be liberated. But, to increase production, that requires a country that is not racked by violence.

He fantasized last year, “In an alternative universe, the United States might re-intervene in Iraq, redeploying tens of thousands of soldiers to restore everyone’s sense of safety and allowing the political process to heal again. In this universe, the United States is never going to intervene in Iraq again, nor will the Maliki government ever request that we do so.”

The result of the Bush administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq so the US government could make the country a client state and secure control of the country’s oil reserves has been horrific for Iraqis.

Dahr Jamail, one of the only American journalists still covering Iraq, reported this month for Truthout that Maliki’s forces had killed “at least 109 civilians” and wounded 632 people since they started to shell Fallujah in January. Doctors, residents and NGO workers, who he spoke with, accused the government of “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity.”

Maliki’s forces prevented medical supplies from entering Fallujah. A doctor said that many houses and a mosque were attacked. Shells hit a hospital. Tens of thousands of families have been displaced and have had very little food or water.

There are possibly a few US military trainers in Iraq and less than 10,000 military contractors, but, for the most part, Jamail said, the US has maintained power and control by selling “$20 billion worth of arms to the Maliki government in the forms of helicopters, tanks, missiles, ammunition, communications equipment and training.” And, when Fallujah erupted into violence in January, President Barack Obama’s “administration put a rush on shipping artillery equipment and missiles over to the Maliki government again to be used against the people of Fallujah.”

Human Rights Watch (HRW) produced a report on the abuse of women in Iraq’s criminal justice system. Thousands of Iraqi women are “imprisoned by a judicial system plagued by torture and rampant corruption.” Convictions are based on confessions “obtained under torture and ill-treatment.” Women are threatened and suffer beatings. Trial proceedings are unfair and “fall far short of international standards.”

An Iraqi woman interviewed by Human Rights Watch, “Israa Salah,” spoke to HRW in a death row facility. She had crutches, as she had suffered “nine days of beatings, electric shocks with an instrument known as ‘the donkey,’ and falaqa,” a form of torture where the victim is “hung upside down and beaten on their feet.” This happened in March 2012 and left her “permanently disabled.” She had a split nose, back scars and was burned on her breasts. She was executed in September 2013, even though lower courts had dismissed charges because she only confessed to a crime after being tortured.

Women are sexually assaulted or raped by prison guards. “Fatima Hussein,” who is a journalist accused of murdering a parliamentarian’s brother and of marrying an al Qaeda member, was physically and sexually tortured. Colonel Ghazi blindfolded her and tied her to a column. She was electrocuted with an electric baton. Her feet and back were hit with a cable. Her hair was pulled. She was tied naked to the column. Cigarettes were extinguished on her body. She was later handcuffed to a bed and forced to give oral sex. Then, with blood all over her, she was raped three times and Ghazi “would relax, have a cigarette and put it out” on her buttocks and then start violating her again.

The 2013 country report from the State Department on Iraq fully acknowledges the torture ongoing in the country. It concluded, “A culture of impunity largely protected members of the security services, as well as those elsewhere in the government, from investigation and successful prosecution for human rights violations. Corruption among officials across government agencies was widespread and contributed to significant human rights abuses.” However, this corruption has not stopped the sales of weapons to Maliki’s government. There have been few condemnations of Maliki or any public requests from the Obama administration for him to resign and be held accountable for crimes against humanity.

Iraqis suffer from grotesque and terrifying birth defects as a result of depleted uranium that was used by the US military. In Fallujah, a courageous woman, Dr. Samira Alani, has taken on the burden of dealing with newborns who have, as Jamail said, “massive multiple systemic defects, immune problems, massive central nervous system problems, massive heart problems, skeletal disorders, baby’s being born with two heads, babies being born with half of their internal organs outside of their bodies,” and “cyclops babies literally with one eye.”

Maliki’s government executed 169 people last year. The government refuses to acknowledge the dysfunction of the criminal justice system and stop executing a number of people who are innocent. Maliki even rebuked the United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon while standing next to him in a joint news conference because Ki-moon had urged the country to halt executions.

Birth defects, rape, torture, and executions—these are the residual effects of the US military occupation. Troops may have withdrawn, but in the aftermath, the country is being ruled by someone who some Iraqis refer to as a “Shia Saddam.”

Yet, in the United States, with the exception of MSNBC host Rachel Maddow’s documentary, “Why We Did It”, mentions of Iraq focus on whether the war was “worth” fighting, if gains of US troops are being lost in Fallujah and how America might overcome its “war-weariness.” Russia’s actions in Crimea have led pundits to wonder if Americans can pull themselves together and find a way to show “strength.”
On the anniversary of the invasion, The Atlantic announced that David Frum, a former speechwriter for Bush who wrote the “Axis of Evil” speech and war for oil, would be joining the media organization as a senior editor.

Any day of the year the organization could have made this announcement. But this is how Americans show contempt for the people of Iraq: by giving promotions to war advocates as we ignore the sheer scale of the injustice and horror we have wrought.

Over 1 million Iraqis died. Iraqis tortured cannot get the US to acknowledge what happened to them at the hands of US forces or contractors. Their suits are dismissed in courts. They struggle to heal. And US military veterans, who discover the reality of what they did, are offered little support. They suffer from homelessness, mental illness and commit suicide in record numbers.

There is no sense of responsibility among journalists in the US media to ensure that there is consistent coverage of Iraq, the least this country could do. Maybe that’s because these people helped fuel the climate that made it possible for the premeditated crime of invading Iraq to occur. Less coverage makes it possible to avoid having to further confront the role they played in a chain of events that now sees Iraq experiencing violence daily.